In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
“Verily we are God’s, and unto Him do we return.”1
To the blessed presence of His Eminence, Grand Ayatollah Bayat-Zanjani (May his lengthy shadow be extended!)
Greetings to you. Your Servant is certain that you have closely followed the course of events of the tenth elections for the presidency of the republic. Although the candidate of the incumbent’s resorting to lies and immeasurable exploitation of the public and government facilities for one-sided propaganda in his favor demonstrates his clique’s special determination to win at any cost and by any possible means, but it was impossible to imagine a falsification of the people’s vote to such an extant and before the astonished eyes of the people of the world from a government in which commitment to the justice of the sharia is considered one of its fundamental pillars.
Today, when we are utterly astonished to witness such a brazen abuse of the people’s trust and all the ways to obtain our rights have been closed, the long-suffering people’s facing the silence of the clergy and the sources of emulation,2 who are considered this people’s firm refuge, will lead to even more damage than an alteration of the votes.
The [government] agents, having resorted to clubs and batons and electric shocks, on trumped-up excuses sought to kill the members of Your Servant’s staff and those who answered its call are perplexed over this, while there is no hope in the honorable judicial branch’s efficacy. Therefore, while the country’s Attorney General is not able to express its legal opinion to so much as prevent the President from having an extra speech on television, what means does it have to prevent this black brutality? In the name of your duty to protect the people’s votes, which have now suffered such great damage, I submit this to you and bring it to your attention so that perhaps mentioning it to you will be useful for the authorities.
“To you, for oppression there is no recourse but prayer.”
Your brother, Mir Hosein Musavi
Answer of the Great Source of Emulation to Engineer Musavi’s Letter
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
Concerned and revolutionary brother, Mr. Engineer Musavi (May exalted God support him).
Peace be unto you.
Just as you have written in your letter, I have followed as best I could the details of the events around the tenth election of the president of the republic and I am in agreement with you concerning the nation’s votes and concerning you as the intellectual representative of a great portion of this nation that they have been wronged. Although, as someone who has been devoted to the affairs of the executive and the legislative branches for long years, I know that sometimes minor violations in corners of minor functionaries’ work crop up, this complete negligence and disrespect for the nation’s votes is unprecedented. It has been years since our dear Imam and, along with him, his revolutionary policies and mentality have vanished from amongst us, but apparently some have buried his caution, consideration, sense of duty, and revolutionary guidance with him. I am in no wise claiming that the period before 1989 was innocent of error and fault, but could anyone have forsaken the law in such a way and then make a mockery of those who complained and then deceive the people about them while the late Imam was still among us? Thus is distorted the revolution’s values while the revolution’s first generation is still alive. The legislators and writers and members of the supervisory staff of the Fundamental Law are still alive and some are brave enough to interpret it in an approving manner. The Imam’s saying, that he considered judgment to lie in the people’s vote, is still repeated amongst us.
Your Servant has for years in various talks and in different places, noted the system’s drifting from the Imam’s ways and ideas and warned against the peaceful establishment of anti-Khomeini ideas in the country, ideas which will ultimately bear no other fruit than the conversion of the Islamic Republic into an Islamic Government and, ultimately, liquidate the people’s worldly and religious life. Now, while supporting Your Excellency and praising your sense of duty and revolutionary concern, I place the following points as elucidated below before the public:
- Those who voted for you wish that you would pursue your oath which you swore before yourself and your God that you will protect their legal rights and respect their country’s laws. Consider this very day the day in which you recall this oath with strength. It is your duty to protect, for yourself and for others, the people’s vote with the help of the omnipotent Creator and your wisdom and full use of the country’s legal means. Similarly, this heavy duty falls upon the shoulders of the other two great candidates, my dear, esteemed, and wronged brother, His Eminence Proof of the Islam and the Muslims [Mehdi] Karoubi and my esteemed brother, His Excellency Dr. [Mohsen] Reza’i. If you had not arrived on the scene first, your obligation would have been different. But now is the time for you to stand up to arrogance and scoffing at the law and not allow disrespect for the law and the will of the majority to spread. Be sure that you and those who are collaborating with you out of pure intentions shall prevail, but pursue these protests and defense of your rights in such a way that the road will be barred to your enemies’ taking advantage of them.
- In such days, banishing oppressing and declaring oneself rid of deplorable deeds in the framework of law and reason are obligatory for one and all. The upright administrators and chiefs of the government, too, must strive in opposition to such deeds, otherwise they will stand condemned before public opinion for ignoring the people’s rights. Today, the principle concern is that the Islamic Republic’s accord with the people has been unilaterally nullified and the Imam’s prominent comrades have been accused of being power-hungry.
- Each of the people, particularly the dear youth, who are after winning their own legal rights, should consider this legal effort a form of “banning the deplorable”,3 in which the sharia and legal stipulations are to be followed. You must always be God-fearing in this great campaign of “banning the deplorable” and know that there are a some whose agenda it is to make you out to be heedless and riotous, and for precisely this reason, you must set a boundary between “banning the deplorable” and riot. It must be emphasized that your rival is not a particular candidate or his supporters or partisans; what has summoned you and the interests of Islamic society to struggle is a faulty and deviant way of thinking which holds that in order for one to achieve ones goals which appear holy, one can resort to any unholy means. Consider such an ideology your primary enemy and that of God’s Faith, and then condemn those who think in such an erroneous fashion. As I have repeatedly said before, the slogans of our youth in this present situation must be that to reach holy goals, one must not accept illegitimate support.
- The widespread demands of the candidates and their supporters is a warning to the judiciary that must be taken seriously. The responsibility of the country’s judiciary is, above all, to be, as an Shiite Islamic judicial scholar, a refuge for the people. If one day a country’s judiciary’s courts cannot establish justice among the people, it is natural that the oppressed will seek out a different way to achieve their rights and, God forbid, the goal of such a group will be riot, insecurity, and a flouting of respect for what is sacred.
In conclusion, I hope that all who are involved in the Islamic Republican system will struggle in obedience to the interests of God’s law and the people and protect public confidence.
Peace upon God’s upright servants.
Qom, Asadollah Bayat-Zanjani
21 Jomada II 1430 (June 15, 2009)
http://bayatzanjani.net/fa/news/article-73.html
Footnotes
1Koran, 2:156
2The believing Shiite is to follow a Source of Emulation, i.e., a religious authority who can provide guidance on all matters of private and religious life.
3An injunction repeated in the Koran that it is the duty of the believer to forbid the improper and command the proper.
Biographical Notes
According to his online biography, Asadollah Bayat-Zanjani was born in a poor farming village not far from Zanjan, in Azerbaijan. He was only able to coax his father into letting him go to Qom to continue his religious studies when, he writes, divine intervention caused his father to dream that he should acceed to this request. On going to Qom, he fell in with the young Ruhollah Khomeini, and joined the Islamic opposition to the Shah. This earned him a ban from preaching and a year in prison in 1972. With the victory of the revolution, he participated in the launching of the Islamic Republican Party and was asked to help form the new judiciary. He was then elected to three terms as representative of the people in and around Zanjan. There, he took on various responsibilities in drafting the Islamic Majlis’ internal regulations, supervision over the electronic media, and similar matters. He lost a number of close relatives during the war with Iraq. His biography stresses that he was one of the few scholars since the turn of the last century to have published a resaleh, i.e., a treatise guiding his followers on the knotty problems they face as Shia Muslims, this qualifying him as a Source of Emulation.
